My Brother's Keeper by Tim Powers

When it comes to the Brontës, there are several camps of followers. I'm sure there are some Anne-ites, but they are the smallest and least-known group. Some, mostly men, mostly contrarians, strongly favor Branwell, and I tend to think do so for the wrong reasons. But the big division is between the Charlottes and the Emilies.

Tim Powers takes up the mantle of the Emilies in this, his most recent novel: My Brother's Keeper, which came out in hardcover in late 2023 and a paperback edition just a few months ago.

The obvious point of comparison is with Powers' 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard, in which the Romantic poets (Shelley, Keats, and Byron) were involved with vampires. There was also a sequel, set a generation later, Hide Me Among the Graves, which brought the Rossetti circle into the mix. If Stress was "the Romantic poets owed their creative powers to vampires," then Keeper is "the Brontës owed their creative powers to werewolves."

Werewolves seem to be less of an obvious source of a creative muse than vampires - cool, aristocratic, long-lived, sensual, sophisticated - were, and that's one reason Keeper is not quite as successful as the vampire books. But it's still a Tim Powers novel, so it's an adept weave of actual history and invented fantasy, with his usual Catholic-tinged mythology which insists that everything - and in particular any touch of the ineffable or creative power - has a cost, and those costs run high very quickly.

The other reason, to my mind, Keeper is not as successful as Stress or even Graves is that it feels, like some of his recent novels - I'll mention Alternate Routes - lighter, less grounded, less thought-through than Powers' best books. The Brontës are somewhat caricatured here, with only Emily getting a fully-rounded treatment, and she's seen entirely in a hero-worshipping light. The prose is thinner, the world less detailed, the supernatural elements more bolted-on than in his best work like Declare or Last Call or The Anubis Gates. Keeper is not particularly short, but it feels too short for what it wants to do, like a book that needed to be about fifty percent longer and go through at least two more drafts.

After a short prologue set in 1830, and before a similarly short afterword, the book has three main parts, each covering a few days in 1846-7 (March, September, and April). The main characters are the Brontës themselves - the three then-surviving sisters and Branwell, plus their father, the local Anglican pastor Patrick - a few werewolfy villains, and Alcuin Curzon, part of an ancient Catholic order devoted to eliminating werewolves.

There is a two-person werewolf god, killed and mostly banished a century or so ago. The female half is buried under Patrick's church floor, without her head, under a stone carved with wards. The male half, called Welsh - and it's sadly typical of this novel that one main villain is unnamed and the other one is called "Welsh" and barely speaks to anyone - appears as a boy and should have been drowned in the Irish Sea, but, sadly, Patrick's grandfather saved him (not knowing the werewolf-god deal at that point) and entangling his family with the power of that biune god.

Branwell is Welsh's particular target, as the heir of the male line. As in other Powers books, Welsh plans to take over Branwell's body, rejuvenating himself and getting the energy to revive his other half. Branwell, weak-willed and hugely susceptible to flattery, falls for Welsh's promises of power and influence and creative energy over and over again, and has to be managed by his sisters, especially Emily. He also, in that prologue, did something Welsh showed him in a dream that tied the fates of Emily, Anne, and himself deeply with the werewolves, and much of the novel comes out of that action and the eventual lengths the Brontë women (Emily in particular) need to go to break that bond.

So: three sections. Each time the power of the werewolves rises, Branwell is weak and abets it, and generally Emily and Curzon (she meets him in the first section) manage to beat back the werewolf power in a way they think will be lasting...but, of course, turns out not to be. The characters share notes as they go, with Patrick providing a lot of relevant family history and Curzon explaining most of the supernatural backstory. In the third section, they finally do the final, most destructive thing - as always in Powers, magic has a huge cost - and settle it once and for all.

For a werewolf novel, we don't see wolves very much. The monsters are skeletons or ghosts or apparitions or flocks of birds for most of the book. Welsh is creepy and compelling when he speaks to Branwell, but that only happens a few times. The most important dog-like creature is Emily's constant companion Seeker, firmly on the side of the heroes. There is a scene or two of something transforming into a wolf, but these werewolves are not nearly as werewolfy as a reader expects.

There's also elements of the supernatural background that feel under-baked. The secret society that basically leeches from the power of these two werewolf gods is headquartered in London, and has some sort of leadership we never see. It's basically said flat-out that they would prefer to keep the gods "dead" (but slightly less dead than they currently are), so that they can keep siphoning power for their own purposes, but that they are being pushed by events to try to resurrect the gods to prevent them from really and finally dying. But the powers of the gods are clearly rising during this book, so I don't see why that organization doesn't pull back rather than blowing up this magical apocalypse they don't really want.

Also, how these gods connect to Powers' core Catholic theology is spikier and more confusing than in some of his books. There's a practically-spoken point that the Christian God can't save anyone from these mostly-dead werewolves, which is not a theological point I'd expect from Powers. (Having to die in the right way to reach a state of grace, absolutely. Some sacrifice too high for anyone to want to make, definitely. But not no way for faith in Yahweh to make things right.)

Tim Powers is a great writer, and even his second-rank books are fun and exciting and full of elements to think and argue about - as witness, see above. This is a second-rank book, but it's also a fairly new novel, in his core style, that I almost missed, so I'm happy I realized it existed and read it. If you haven't read Powers, though, and this material sounds interesting, hit Regard first.

Better Things: Intelligentactile 101

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

There are songs I can write a lot about, and have deep opinions on. There are other songs I love the sound of, the way they leap and move, and the sound the words make.

This is one of the latter: Jesca Hoop's fun, bouncy Intelligentactile 101, from her 2007 debut record Kismet.

It's a song about being alive, I think: being in flesh, and glorying in all things fleshy. But Hoop is singing it from the point of view of someone coming to that fleshiness as a brand-new thing: maybe an alien, maybe a personality that will become a baby any minute now, maybe something else strange and unusual and surprising.

Can I borrow your skin, blushing to get lucky in
Lucky lucky lucky lucky with a special friend
Well I hear that on planet earth that it's a sin, big sin
Well all the more fun for me to get lucky then

Hoop is one of the great originals, a musician and songwriter who makes soundscapes that sound like nobody else and goes to unexpected lyrical places all of the time. (Tom Waits was an early mentor - she was actually a nanny for his kids for a while - and, though the sounds and styles are very different, the quirkiness and specificity of her work has some things in common with Waits.)

This was the first song of hers I ever heard - I'm not sure if it was officially the first Kismet single, or just a bouncy, energetic, zippy song that the world picked up on. But it's a fine place to start for a great musician, and a weird little ditty all on its own.

Books Read: March 2025

Here's what I read this past month. I list it here mostly as a way to keep track of it for myself; if it helps one other person in the world I suppose that's a bonus. I add links as the posts go live; I'm currently running five to six weeks ahead, so you'll have a bit of a wait.

James Kochalka, Mechaboys (3/1, digital)

Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount (3/1)

J.L. Westover, Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings (3/2, digital)

Jack Vance, Servants of the Wankh (3/2, in Planet of Adventure)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage (3/8, digital)

Jaime Hernandez, Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings: 1980-2020 (3/9, digital)

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (3/9, in Waugh Abroad)

Andrea "Casty" Castellan, Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension (3/15, digital)

Mike Mignola, Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (3/16, digital)

Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (3/16)

Julian Hanshaw, Cloud Hotel (3/22, digital)

Megan Nicole Dong, Sharky Malarky: A Sketchshark Collection (3/23, digital)

David Goodis, Down There (3/23, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Brian Michael Bendis and Bill Walko, Fortune & Glory: The Musical (3/28, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves (3/28)

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, An Embarrassment of Witches (3/29, digital)

Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier, Space Circus (3/30, digital)

Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (3/30, in Complete Novels)

Carl Hiaasen, Paradise Screwed (3/31)

In April, I'm pretty sure I will read some more books.

Quote of the Week: A Child's First Heraclitus

I was excited to be moving, and I would be starting in an extra-good school, but what about my friends? What about Susie Q and The Raven? We'd been together since first grade. It was promised that they would all come out on my birthday, and here I was seeing them only a couple of weeks since moving, but there was already something different. The everyday stuff was gone. If I had asked them what happened yesterday, or the past week, they would have said nothing, nothing special, but they had all been part of that nothing, they knew exactly what kind of nothing it had been, and I hadn't, and I didn't. All at once I understood that the nothing was going to pile up, and while we would still like each other, we wouldn't know each other the same way.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, p.16

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles by Stan Sakai

This sixth volume is slightly longer than the previous ones, collecting seven issues of the Usagi Yojimbo series (#25 - 31, November 1990 through November 1991), plus a story from the anthology Critters #38. But it's otherwise much like the previous books, down to the mixture of one-off stories (several of the issues collected) and a longer "mythology" multi-parter in which our hero returns to his home village, hoping to settle down and get out of the killing-random-people business. Of course, if he could do that, the series would end, and there are seventeen more volumes of this series, so...you can guess he learns the old Thomas Wolfe lesson.

Usagi Yojimbo: Circles was originally published in the early nineties; the current edition (no indications of what's different; it's probably not much) is from 2014. It has four stories up front - three of them full-length, and one ten-pager, "Yurei" - and the four-part "Circles" to close out the book. It also has an introduction from Jeff Smith, dated 1994, which is a bit of a time capsule itself.

In "Circles," we learn that sex actually does happen in this very tween-friendly world, although it happens, as far as we see, in a chaste embrace while both characters are still fully dressed. Still, baby steps. And I should say that I am too cynical and jaded to be a really good guide to Usagi Yojimbo: I enjoy it and appreciate creator Stan Sakai's story-telling ability while still seeing it both as a very second-hand thing (an American riff on the historical fiction of actual Japanese people about their actual history) and as something deliberately cleaned up and sanded down for that younger audience. (To be blunt, I don't see why an adult would read this rather than going to the seinen classics like Lone Wolf and Cub: it is very much a derivative version of those.)

So Usagi battles a demon (not quite a troll, but the same sort of thing) in "The Bridge," protecting the village he's just wandered into randomly. He gets caught up in a gambler's scheme in "The Duel," unwittingly, and of course kills the gambler's hand-picked fighter, which is sad for that guy's wife and child. (There's also a fair bit of cop-movie-style "I'll just do This One Last Job, honey, and then we'll have enough money to retire from This Dangerous Life forever!" which is as ironic as it always is, in the same ways.) "Yurei" sees Usagi help out a ghost after mostly forgetting what she told him, in the traditional way of causing those who caused her death to die themselves. And "My Lord's Daughter" is a very over-the-top, battle-heavy story, full of monsters, in which Usagi fights through hordes to save the title character from a gigantic, vicious Oni and its minions...and which turns out to be a bedtime story Usagi is telling a bunch of kids, showing Sakai realizes what the whole of Usagi Yojimbo is, and is willing to joke about it.

Then we hit "Circles," which is the story of Usagi going back to the village where he grew up, and hoping to settle there. He first learns that his old teacher, who lives in a remote location not far from the village, is surprisingly still alive - Usagi last saw him falling from a high cliff towards the usual rapids - which is encouraging. But the new village headman, Kenichi, is married to the girl Usagi loved, Mariko, - they had a rivalry about that, among other things - and doesn't like or trust him at all. Meanwhile, the creepy supernatural samurai Jei from the third book is back - from the dead, actually - and is leading a band of bandits to find and kill Usagi on behalf of (he claims) the gods. Jei does have supernatural powers, so, on balance, I'm willing to grant that some gods are on his side

Jei's bandits threaten and harass and raid the village. Kenichi and Usagi, as the two trained samurai, lead the villagers in fighting them off and planning a counter-attack, but Kenichi's young son Jotaro is nabbed by the bandits, raising the stakes. There's a big fight, Usagi kills Jei once again, and Jotaro is saved. But Usagi learns a deep secret, and has to leave the village because of it, never to settle there. (He could, of course, settle somewhere else, and he'll probably think of that eventually - but the point of a wandering-samurai series is for the samurai to wander, so don't expect it any time soon.)

As before, this is well-done samurai action, in a register suitable for middle-grade readers. Sakai is a fine story-telling cartoonist, adept at large groups of random animal-headed people fighting with each other with medieval weaponry, and every bit of Usagi Yojimbo I've seen has been solid adventure-story material, superbly crafted with a fine control of tone to hit both comedic and dramatic moments. I still think the originals Sakai used as models are better and more interesting, but this is both excellent and something you can hand to your tweens without worry.

Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted by Kris, Rob & Dave

I'm sure there have been other Cyanide & Happiness books. It would be really unlikely that a fairly popular strip would run for fifteen years without any kind of a collection being printed on dead trees. But I haven't seen or noticed a C&H collection since the one-two punch of Cyanide & Happiness and Ice Cream & Sadness back in 2010.

On the other hand, I've been reading the web mostly via RSS feeds since at least that far back, and, as we all know, feeds can die quietly and mysteriously, while the underlying content keeps going, so we think something is gone - or, more often, don't notice or think about it - when it definitely isn't. And I'm pretty sure that I had C&H in my feeds, maybe multiple times, but I can't remember seeing it recently. So I think there was yet another case of linkrot, either deliberate (they want to drive people to their website, where other items can be purchased) or random (which can never been discounted).

But I noticed this book - Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted, a big anniversary collection of the strip published in mid-December, just too late for Xmas shipping. It's credited to "Kris, Rob & Dave" - Wilson, DenBleyker, and McElfatrick, respectively, the "Matt" who was part of C&H back in the early days seems to have dropped out long ago and gets one vague reference in this book but no explanation - and is the traditional "annotated collection of the best stuff" that strips often bring out for a big round anniversary.

And that's great, since that kind of book works better for webcomics than a traditional reprint anthology does, anyway. Remember: the point of a webcomic is that it's always accessible, online, 24/7/265. You can always just go there and read the entire archives, without buying a book. This book has fewer strips than if they were just packed in like cordwood, and getting the three creators to annotate them and laying that all out was clearly more work, but it makes a better, more distinctive, useful package. I don't want to say all webcomic collections should be in this style, but maybe all of the gag-a-day strips should seriously consider it.

Cyanide & Happiness has one of the weirder and odder origin stories, even for a webcomic. The four guys were all teens in 2005, hanging out on a webforum but hugely physically separated in real life - McElfratrick is Irish, for one example - and one of them did a quick crude comic in this style, and it snowballed from there. (They've also created a lot of animation over the years, and at least one card game - all with the same art style and deliberately offensive humor.) It looks like they spent some years in the same place: Dallas, as a suitable random American city. But that ended, for either pandemic or getting-older and lives-getting-more-complicated reasons, and they're once again physically separated, making comics and animation randomly in basements and back rooms wherever they happen to live now.

So each C&H strip is credited to one of the guys, because that guy did that strip. And their styles are somewhat discernable - or maybe were more so in the early days. But it's all the same kind of thing, and they riff off each other, with random theme weeks - usually either specifically Depressing comics or something tasteless - thrown in willy-nilly to pull them together.

These are jokes about farts and drinks and violence and sex and dicks and so on - the subject matter was mostly formed when they were teen boys, so C&H is still largely about the things that make teen boys laugh. (There were a lot of shitposts in the early days. Maybe still a few even now.) I thought it was mostly successful back in 2010, when I saw the early strips, and this big collection still seems mostly successful now - it's crude, it's tasteless, it's dumb, but there's always been a strong current of that kind of humor in America. (Think Truly Tasteless Jokes or 101 Uses for a Dead Cat or the one about how to fit five elephants into a Volkswagen.)

If you like that style of humor, you've probably seen Cyanide & Happiness sometime in the past twenty years. (Maybe not. Maybe you are a teen boy right now, and this is all new.) This is probably the best single book to experience the strip: it's got examples from all of the eras of the strip (such as they are), lots of annotations and added jokes, photos of the C&H guys doing various things at comics conventions over the past two decades, and similar stuff. Or, you know, you could just hit the website and read the archives, as I referenced way back at the beginning of this post. That's always an option for a webcomic; don't forget it.

The Fifth Beatle by Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson

This was kinda a big deal about ten years ago; you may have heard about it then. The edition I read was a tenth anniversary thingy - that's the technical term - from 2023, with additional essays and material in the back to justify a new hardcover price. (But I read it digitally, which mean pinching to blow up double-page spreads quite a lot; much of this is in Eye-Strain-O-Vision on a normal-sized consumer tablet.)

So it was a New York Times bestseller, won Eisners and Harveys and a Reuben - as I said, a big deal. The Beatles, you might have heard, were somewhat popular - more so than Jesus, one guy noted in the late '60s - and this was not just well-done, but hit at a good cultural moment.

The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story is a graphic novel, about a hundred and thirty pages (plus, in the current edition, the additional material I mentioned, mostly essays by the author on various aspects of the book's and Epstein's history), written by Vivek J. Tiwary and painted by Andrew C. Robinson, with lettering by Steve Dutro and one section with art by Kyle Baker.

It covers the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s, as seen by their manager, Epstein - he's the viewpoint character and our central protagonist. The Beatles themselves are mostly in puckish-goofball mode here, occasionally getting individual moments (just John and Paul) but clearly backgrounded: the premise is that they are a world-changing creative force, and are out there doing that, while Epstein supports and facilitates and manages that work. More important to the narrative is Moxie, a young woman who first works for Epstein in his family store NEMS and comes to be his personal assistant in his wider-ranging Beatles businesses. (From Tiwary's note at the end, I think she's completely fictional, and exists both to indicate the support he got from the family business and a semi-love relationship for Epstein - though utterly unrequited on his side - that's somewhat positive and happy.) We also see other business contacts, a few of them multiple times, but the focus is on Epstein and, mostly just offstage, the continuing creative engine that is the Beatles.

Epstein was Jewish in an era where prejudice was still pretty open in the UK. And he was gay in an era when that was actively outlawed, and being arrested could lead to ruin and jail. His Jewishness isn't particularly important to Fifth Beatle, other than making Epstein a bit more of an outsider, but Tiwary uses his homosexuality - other than one, possibly fictionalized, off-and-on relationship with an American man that turns into blackmail, entirely as a background longing or note - as a central motif, core to his outsiderness. 

Tiwary implies that Epstein sublimated his sex-drive into business, that he poured all of himself that he could into working as hard as possible to make the Beatles the world-famous band he was sure they would be. And he also implies that's what eventually killed Epstein, of what he doesn't actually say in this book was an accidental overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol.

(I suspect those both are plausible simplifications, which work in a creative story, but that Epstein both had a much more active sex life than Tiwary shows here and that his death was basically a random accident. Thematically, though, it all works within The Fifth Beatle.)

I appreciated The Fifth Beatle - especially Robinson's magnificent pages; the new edition's cover by Christopher Brunner and Rico Renzi is, I'm sorry to say, vastly lesser than the original sweeping wraparound and the atmospheric, electric interior art - but I found Epstein mostly a one-note character. He's a sublimated homosexual, a workaholic devoted entirely to making the Beatles as huge as possible - really? All of the other acts that he quickly started representing; what about them? What was his sex life really like - purely cruising and cottaging, or anything longer and more meaningful?

The Fifth Beatle wraps things up too neatly to touch on questions like that; it's too much the story of The Man Who Died Making the Beatles Famous. That's what the audience wants, clearly - see how successful the book has been - but it's only about as true as any similar simplification for a mass audience.

A Prefect's Uncle by P.G. Wodehouse

Second novels are not necessarily disappointing. But they regularly are the same sort of thing as the first novel, executed more quickly or with less inspiration, and suffer a bit from comparison.

A Prefect's Uncle was P.G. Wodehouse's second novel, published way back in 1903 when he was in his very early twenties. It followed The Pothunters, which hit shelves the year before. I can't find any indication that it was originally serialized, as Pothunters was, but it feels like a serialization, and it looks like all of Wodehouse's early school stories were originally published in magazines such as the obviously named Public School Magazine.

Pothunters was a small thing, a book clearly assembled from parts, but it was fun and amusing, full of characters who sounded real and inhabited a real world, and it had a plot that meandered but did, more or less, circle the missing trophy alluded to in the title. I don't want to claim a lot for it, but it was a solid genre exercise - in a genre that's been dead for a hundred years now, admittedly, and never was popular on my side of the Atlantic to begin with - and it showed that this Wodehouse fellow was someone to keep an eye on, who could do good things and probably would.

Prefect's Uncle is the same sort of thing, but down a notch or two in most areas. The central plot is not really about the uncle of the central prefect; it's more a sequence of mostly cricket matches, told in very detailed language that I have to imagine would be smashing fun for someone who actually understands how cricket works. From my seat, I can say it all sounds impressive, and that Wodehouse describes the action of the matches well, with a deep facility at drama and knowledge of cricket terminology and tactics, even if it all just turns into a wall of random words to me.

Our central character is Alan "Bishop" Gethryn, head prefect of Leicester's house at the fictional Beckford public school. He's seventeen or so, near the end of his schooling, smart and upright and full of all of the traditional English public-school virtues. Bishop meets two new students in quick succession: first is his new fag (yes, yes, I know - it was a very different era and the usage of that word has shifted quite a lot) Percy Wilson, who is true and smart and good and rather boring and plays very little part in the novel. Next is Bishop's uncle, who he has to meet at the station. He thinks this is a conventional uncle: a generation older, with luck open-handed with the pocket-money and not too tedious with the advice. But it is actually a younger boy, one Reginald Farnie, who has been kicked out of three well-known public schools already, and is the kind of terror Wodehouse would get a lot of mileage out of later in his career.

As it is, though, Farnie doesn't do a whole lot here, though he does cause Bishop to miss a very important cricket match - which Bishop cannot explain to anyone, for the usual vague and unclear stiff-upper-lip reasons - and that means Bishop loses his place on the school's cricket team after they lose that very important match to a rival school. But Bishop is still captain of his house's team, so there's more planning and training and detailed descriptions of inter-house matches and a muddled rebellion by some of the "bad boys" of that house, who Bishop kicks off the team and replaces with very junior boys.

Again, there's a lot of cricket in this book. I think it's told well, and could be gripping to a reader who understands what's happening. For me, though, it was largely a sequence of baroque technical terms about kinds of bowling and where balls are being hit and how wet and/or sticky the particular ground was that day. Wodehouse also includes a certain amount of "well, this match is against that village, and they have a couple of ringers from this county team, so it's semi-important, but the next one is against Rival School, so it is of earth-shattering importance, and then there's the inter-house play, of which only these three houses are important, for reasons I will detail at great length". So I did the names-in-Russian-novels thing and mostly hummed through the cricket matches, which are roughly 40% of the novel by weight.

If you want to read a really early Wodehouse novel, to see how he did school stories, I recommend Pothunters. If you know how cricket works, you could try this one instead, but be sure you really do know how cricket works. It will test that knowledge very strongly.